Google Share by Douwe OsingaGoogle share allows you to plot the mindshare of a series of terms within a domain. The google share of a search term for a domain is defined as the percentage of hits for that domain that also contain the search term.
According to Google, 5% of all pages containing the word news, also contains fox, beating both the bbc (slightly over 2%) and cnn (slightly under 2%). [...]
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Canned Laughter Box by Douwe OsingaCanned laughter box is a small executable consisting of one button that when clicks, plays a laughter sound. The idea is that you can install this program and anytime somebody tells a joke, press the button. In comedies they use canned laughter to make jokes seem funnier. Why not in real life.
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SineClock by Douglas Irving RepettoSineClock is an ambient sound installation for the desktop. It uses slight differences in the frequencies of sinewaves to aurally encode the time of day.
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Archean selforganization by Douwe OsingaArchean is an attempt to use cellular automata to create always changing patterns that are different each time you run the program.
The idea is rather simpel. Each cell contains a vector of six reals. The average vector of the neighbourhood is then calculated and multiplied by a matrix. This result is added to the vector of the cell. [...]
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Wiki Wiki Web by Site and software by Ward Cunningham. Text by many.Launched in 1995, WikiWikiWeb is the first-ever Wiki. Its topic loosely centers on programming issues - and whatever its readers find to be "related" discourse. WikiWikiWeb is interesting both as a text about software and its culture and as software itself. Anyone can edit or add new content in a straightforward manner. [...]
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The Jargon File by Various authors. Maintained by Eric S. RaymondThe Jargon File is a long-running dictionary of hacker slang continuously contributed by hackers, which provides an insight into hacker and thus software culture. ("Hacker" in this context refers not to people who break into computers, but to devoted programming enthusiasts.) The Jargon File also includes chapters analyzing hacker Jargon construction by identifying characteristics such as [...]
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INTERCAL by Don Woods, James Lyon; current implementation by Eric S. RaymondINTERCAL is a programming language that, through parody, criticizes other programming languages. It reminds us that programming languages, like the software developed with them, are not neutral nor transparent.
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Batmemes by Grasshopper EnterprisesBatmemes is marketed as software for algorithmically tackling writer's block. It uses algorithms inspired by the thought-generating experiments of the Oulipo movement, which took place in France in the 1960's. Batmeme's configuration options allow you to highly customize your auto-generated ideas. For example, you might choose to tint your new thoughts with shades of batDNA from Bram Stoker's [...]
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Story Teller by Tom Jennings"Obsolete forgery, historical fiction, a concrete realization of a lie. Story Teller tells tales stored on tape, via speech, text on paper, a semi-translucent spectacle of mediation and machinery.
It is a system of cooperative but independent devices, mechanisms, and mechanical contrivances, of ambiguous age and origin.
Externally, is speaks, prints, draws and writes. [...]
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Post-media Aesthetics by Lev ManovichWritten in 2001. This text proposes that since the concept of media no longer adequately decribes contemporary cultural practice, cultural theory can intead use the concepts of software and interface to understand both past and present.
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Avant-garde as Software by Lev ManovichWritten in 1999. This text suggests that the techniques of early twentieth century avant-garde became the basic operations of modern software and human-machine interfaces. This thesis is being expanded in Lev Manovich's book INFO-AETHETICS (expected 2004).
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